6 Person and individual: some anthropological reflections 1 J.S. La Fontaine In the paper reprinted in this volume, Mauss argues that the idea of the individual is unique to Western thought. He uses an evolutionary method which was, even at the time which he wrote (1938), somewhat old fash-ioned, to trace the development of the idea and to set out a contrast between the social and moral significance of the individual in Western society and the absence of such a concept in other societies. Dumont, his pupil, makes this contrast the basis of the opposition set out in Homo Hierarchicus, between hierarchy, the fundamental principle of Indian so-ciety, and equality, which is a Western idea, rooted in individualism. However, Mauss's essay appears to have made little impact on British anthropology until comparatively recently.2 The earliest article on the subject by Read (1955) offers empirical confirmation of the French view, arguing that the New Guinean people he studied lack a concept of the person, a term he, like Mauss, attributes uniquely to Western thought, though strangely Read does not mention Mauss. Read's article remained an isolated example of British work on this topic until an important con-tribution by Fortes (1973), which takes the opposite view: that all socie-ties have a concept of the person. Other anthropologists have contributed ethnographic data which can be used to further a discussion which, with a revival in Britain of anthropological concern with systems of thought, has once again become of central interest. This chapter has two aims: to discuss Mauss's conclusion in the light of subsequent ethnographic evidence and then to advance an explanation for the manifest variation in concepts of the person which the ethnogra-phy demonstrates. My view is that such concepts cannot be considered 124

J.S. La Fontaine out of context. In particular I shall be arguing that social representations of society itself, and the nature of authority within society, give a char-acteristic form to related notions of the person. It is already clear that the Western concept of the person needs clarifi-cation, for the terms person and individual have been used as though they were interchangeable although they are not (cf. Beattie 1980:313-14). Mauss starts by distinguishing between the social concept of the person and any human being's self-awareness, which he regards as universal, as manifest in language and largely the concern of linguists and psycholo-gists. He thus contrasts consciousness of self, which he sees as com-pounded of aW"feness of the body and of the spirit, an 'individuality, both spiritual and physical' with a social concept. The social concept, the idea of the person, is a compound of jural rights, and moral responsibil-ity; it also includes what Mauss attributes to the Greek roots of our civ-ilisation, a notion of the actor behind the mask, the unique and transient human being. This is translated by Christianity into the idea of the soul to arrive finally at the notion of a unity, of body and soul, mind and conscience, thought and action which is summed up in the concept of the individnal which Mauss labelled 'the person', 'la personne morale'. Du-mont, in building on Mauss's work, uses the term 'individual' rather than person, bnt he refers to the same idea: the social concept of a unique and indivisible unity. Alan MacFadane in his recent book, The Origins of English Individualism, describes it as: " ... the view that society is con-stituted of autonomous, equal units, namely separate individuals and that such individuals are more important, ultimately, than any larger constit-uent group. It is reflected in the concept of individual private property, in the political and legal liberty of the individual, in the idea of the indi-vidnal's direct communication with God" (MacFadane 1978:5). The. Western concept of the individual thus gives jural, moral and social sig-nificance to the mortal human being, the empirically observable entity. This entity, its constitution, acts and motivation receives some form of social recognition in all societies. In order to compare the variability of social forms against the nniversal human being of which they are representations, some clarification of terms is essential. Mauss uses the term 'person' to refer to one distinct variety of such collective representations, the Western idea, which Dumont and MacFadane, following an eadier tradition, have labelled 'individualism'. If the self is an individual's awareness of a unique identity, the 'person' is society's confirmation of that identity as of social significance. Person and individual are identified in contrast to the self. i .. ..J

Person and individual in anthropology 125 Radcliffe-Brown, the source of many of the contributions from British anthropologists, makes a sharp distinction between individual and per-son, from a theoretical stance which ignores both awareness of self and the collective representations. His characteristically lucid exposition as-serts: Every human being living in soCiety is two things: he is an individual and he is also a person. As an individual he is a biological organism .... Human beings as individuals are objects of study for physiologists and psycholo-gists. The human being as a person is a complex of social relationships .... As a person the human being is the object of study for social anthropolo-gists (1940:193-4). The copcept of the person i.s thus a technical term which abstracts certain features, roles in social relationships, from the empirical reality, Mauss's self-conscious unity of mind and body. There seems no possibility of con-fusion; but Radcliffe-Brown is aware that in. common padance no such clear distinctions are made. He continues in a later passage: If you tell me that an individual and a person are after all really the same thing, I would remind you of the Christian creed. God is three persons, but to say that He is three individuals is to be guilty of a heresy for which men have been put to death. Yet the failure to distinguish individual and person is not merely a heresy in religion: it is worse than that; it is a source of confusion in science (1940:194). Radcliffe-Brown is himself guilty of falling into this confusion. As his critics have pointed out, in his article on The Mother's Brother in South Africa, he explains the social relationship between the roles Mother's Brother and Sister's Son as though it were a relationship between individ-uals. It is a fault of which methodological individualists, who use their society's concepts as though they were analytical tools, have also been accused.3 Clearly, for Western Europeans the distinction between the in-dividual and person is hard to make.' Radcliffe-Brown ignores the problem of how society conceptualises the self but Fortes, in an article written for a conference devoted to consid-ering Mauss's paper (Fortes 1973), transposes Radcliffe-Brown's term 'person' from theoretical anthropology to ethnography, using it as a label for the social representation. For him then, Mauss's fpersonne morale' 'is merely a special case of a concept common to all societies: he argues "that the notion of the person in the Maussian senses is intrinsic to the very nature and structure of human society and human social behaviour everywhere" (1973:288). This .is because such a concept is concerned with "the perennial problem of how individual and society are intercon-J ' ..... , L-J ..... .I V/Ht-HUt: nected" (ibid); the. context of the article shows. 'individual' clearly means what Radchffe-Brown means by the term Since I use F ' , ortes s ap-Proach here I shall also accept his wider ethnographl'C cl fi . . f , , e mtIon 0 per-son. In what follows I shall use the term 'individual' to refer to the mortal human bemg, the object of observation, and 'person' to refer to Conce t such as that of the Tallensi which lend the object social significance. Thi: usage has the advantage of an attempt to maintain the distinction be-tween mdlVldual and person, the difficulty of which was commented on by Radchffe-Brown and Dumont. It still allows us to use the term 'ind'-vlduahsm' or. 'individualist' to refer to the Western variety of the of person whIch, I shall argue, is indeed different from those found in tbe four exemplar socIeties to whose ethnography I now turn. All four societies: the Tallensi of Ghana the Lugbara f U d h T' ,0 gana,te aIta of Kenya and the Gahuku-Gama of Highland New G . . '. umea are ag- lackmg centralised political institutions, in the absence of WhICh, patnhneal descent organises local communities, though in dif-ferent ways. There are many dIfferences in tbeir concepts but tbe similar-ItIes reveal that overall they resemble one another I'n th . f , , elf concepts 0 person more than they resemble the individualist West. It should be clear, then, that my conclusions differ from Fortes tbough I h' h ' use IS ap-proac to the problem. . In these human beings are seen as composite creatures; m all four the mdlVldual human being is composed of t' Id' . ma ena an Im-materIal components. Neither-aspect is necessarily simple; indeed, as Beattie remarks (1980), the concep.ts of other societies often seem immensely complex by comparison with the ethnographer's own. Like our own however, concepts of the person serve to identify and explain a range of behaVIOur, emotions and events. None of the concepts are sttictly WIth the concept of person which characterises individual-Ism,. for the elements are not unified into a whole which of itself has There IS a dIfference in the degree to which material or im-matenal elements are emphasised where the immaterl'al f h ' components 0 t e of greatest significance some human beings are not persons at all. ThIS IS true of the Tallensi and Lugbara, whose concepts of the person dIstingUIsh most clearly between the transient reall'ty of h l'fe d . I' 'fi uman 1 an socIa sIgm cance. Living beings and social roles To take the Tallensi concepts first: a human being has .. h' h . r' If b " Sit, W IC IS not I e Itse, ut that whIch constitutes the living body as a' . umque entIty, J ....................' -_::>,Person and individual in anthropology 127 d"d I'. A' d"d I' . . b d . h an in IV} ua m our terms. n ID IVl ua S possessions are lm ue WIt his (or her?) sii; the taboos which an eldest son mnst observe towards his father's possessions are said, by Tallensi, to prevent conflict between the sii of the son and tbat of his living father, for it is sii which accounts for tbe state of personal relations between individuals. The attraction and repulsion of the sii in each individual engenders liking or dislike. It would seem that the sii vanishes at death, when it is detached from tbe body (poani); this possibility of detachment is not identical with tbe body's mortality, for tbe sii may be detached temporarily and harmlessly in sleep, although it is also vulnerable to mystical injury. The living body is what distinguishes persons (niriba) from ancestors, ghosts and non-human spirits on the one hand; the immaterial aspects distinguish men from animals. However, certain sacred crocodiles, which are manifestations of the ancestors, are persons for they combine the human spiritual aspects with a living body; not all crocodiles are persons, merely those which satisfy these essential prerequisites. Individuals are distinguished from one anotber by their distinct sii; names do not have this effect, for they identify the individual, first with "an event in the life history of his family" (the public name), and secondly with an ancestral guardian (the private name). These distinguish him first from other indi-viduals, by reference to a family, and secondly ftom among his agnates. The shrine which Fortes calls a Personal Destiny shrine, embodies the' fate already prepared for its owner and is associated with a set of ances-tors; it tbus disringuishes him as an individual but in terms of a "place in a system of social relations" (Fortes 1973:315). A human being's unique identity is tbus determined from tbe first by his place in society. To tbe Lugbara human beings are bodies, animated by and infused with adro spirit. This spirit is a refraction of Spirit, the capital letter being used by Middleton to represent the "immanent aspect of divinity" (1973:494); it is responsible not only for life itself but also for an indi-vidual's desires and wishes. Women's adro is responsible for their erratic behaviour, their yielding to personal whims and their association witb the bush which is the location of Spirit. This is because women lack or-indi, a spirit of responsibility which enables an individual to control his egoistic adro; arindi grows with age, it is weak in small boys and sttong-est in old men, altbough individuals vary in the amount tbey manifest. "A man who behaves contrary to this expected [male] behaviour does so because his spirit is too strong and out of control and if it is too blatant he may be tbought a witch" (Middleton 1973:503). It is this quality of responsibility, orindi, which accounts, in Lugbara views, for the author-ity of men and tbe jural minority of women. It is tbus intelligible that it

.128 J.S. La Fontaine is orindi which is transformed into ori (ghost), or rather a'bi, that ele-ment of the ghost (for they are composite beings too), which is responsi-ble for and responsive to, its descendants. It is thus, as Middleton states, orindi which confers personhood on Lugbara men, though not on all. There are significant categories of Lughara men who are not persons, as we shall see. Bodily idioms and concepts of the individual Concepts of biology are believed by those who hold them to represent the empirical reality of human beings; in some societies, they may locate elements of human behaviour in organs of the body, linking human phys-iology and psychology. Thus the Taita individual, according to Harris, is "an entity made up of various components and capacities, some of them surviving death and connected with bodily parts and processes" (Harris 1978:49). The head is associated with the total individual being: (Harris's phrase is the 'total person'). It is seen as the locus of consciousness, speech, memory and knowledge. Women's heads are held to be weaker than men's, their hearts more prone to disturbance. The heart is the seat of emotion, in particular emotions which affect others, of which the most important is anger. It is also the source of life, for when the heart is 'finished', the individual is dead. Because of the heart, in its mystical aspect, human beings male and female, can become ancestors and affect their living de-scendants; in living individuals the anger of the heart may cause misfor-tune to the one who arouses it. Taita rituals normally involve a blessing to cool and cast out anger from the heart; the term for this act, butasi, is also the Taita name for their religion. In similar vein the Tallensi also attribute various emotions to different organs of the body. They distinguish between head and heart but in dif-ferent terms from the Taita. The quality yam, which Fortes glosses as wisdom or good judgement, increases with age and progressively en-hances its owner's personhood, and is located in the abdomen. Fortes also tells us that the terms for the various emotions are compounds of the root word indicating the bodily region with which they are identified. However, it is among the Gahuku-Gama as described by Read (1955) that the material ( ~ h a t we would call the biological) aspect of the indi-vidual receives its greatest emphasis. Read writes: "To an extent which it is perhaps difficult for us to appreciate and understand, the various parts of the body, limbs, eyes, nose, hair, the internal organs and bodily excretions are essential constituents of the human personality, incorpo-rating and expressing the whole in each of their several parts. It follows

Person and individual in anthropology 129 that an injury to any part of the body is also comparable to damage to the personality of the individual sustaining the injury" (1955:265). Among the Gahuku-Gama a whole range of behaviour, from everyday greeting to the rituals of mourning when hair is cut, follows from this premise. A feature of Gahuku-Gama ideas which I shall set out at more length is the significance of 'skin', a notion which includes the .fleshy covering of the body; it represents the whole range of characteristics of the indi-vidual. Cultural differences, as manifest in individual behaviour, are re-ferred to as skins of .the same or different kind; "indebtedness involves having a debt 'on one's skin'." Moral evaluations can also he expressed in this way; individuals can be described as having good or bad skins. A bad skin may also refer to a social state; a state of mourning is 'having a bad skin'. It is consistent with all these attitudes to the body, as Read argues, that relationships are expressed in frequent and intimate touch-ing, bodily contact and fondling. The frequent rites associated with the development of children are directed to their physical growth and devel-opment. By comparison the meni, the immaterial element which gives life to the body and which is described by Read as "the essential principle of human nature, the whole self or personality .:.. this element is of negligible significance. At death it simply ceases to exist; what remains is something so insubstantial as to have no characteristics and no individuality" (Read 1955: 265). Read argues that among the Gahuku-Gama there is "no essential sep-aration of the individual from the social pattern; social roles and social status are not distinguished from the individuals who enact them" (1955:276). The incorporation of non-physical attributes into the 'skin' of the living human being makes the same point in Gahuku-Gama terms. In a telling passage, Read shows that the lack of a concept of friendship follows from these same premises. In Western Europe the notion of friendship is defined as a relationship between two unique individuals, not by virtue of any socially defined relationship such as that of neigh-bour or kinsman, but as social persons in the Maussian sense. The Ga-huku-Gama could not grasp this idea; it was impossible for them to con-ceive of a relationship apart from one defined in social structural terms. It was not, as Read points out, that in their daily life they did not show personal preferences, interact more with some people than others, but such behaviour was not conceptualised as a relationship between per-sons. Read's paper is argued towards an explanation of the relativisitic moral code of the Gahuku-Gama, which he claims rests on the lack of a concept 130

J.S. La Fontaine of the person. He does not cite Mauss, but his detailed discussion of the Christian origin of the idea makes it clear that he is making the same point: that the idea of the person is peculiar to a particular society or civilisation. By contrast, among this New Guinean people;: "Individual identity and social identity are two. sides of the same coin" (Read 1955:276). The bodily idiom used by the Gahuku-Gama should perhaps be seen as the conceptual mechanism whereby these people obliterate the distinc-tion between an individual and his social roles by incorporating the latter into his physical self, into the skin. Yet this is an ethnocentric formula-tion for it implies a prior distinction between sdf and society, actor and role which does not seem to exist among the Gahuku-Gama. It would be more accurate to say that the Gahuku-Gama do not distinguish clearly the material and immaterial (including the social) attributes of persons. Their concept of the person is totally particularised. Since there is no awareness of -relationships unstructured by recognised roles, which are part of each individual, there is no general category of personhood, merely distinct personalities, defined by their particular social relations. These particular sets of roles are unique combinations of relationships which, like the body, cease to exist at death. It is not surprising to find Read emphasising the strong sense of self and the violent aggressive behaviour of Gahuku-Gama, for their concept of the person implies that bodily strength is social power. Social continuity, responsibility and concepts of the person If the Gahuku-Gama seem to recognise no generalised concept of per-sonhood, this is clearly not true of the other societies I am considering, although their concepts of personhood do not extend to all individuals. As I have pointed out, most Lugbara women and some Lugbara men are not persons. Rainmakers and diviners, who are often women, are asso-ciated with adro, spirit and hence with the bush, not the settlements where ancestral shrines are located. T h ~ y are thus outside society in some sense, since they do not participate in the association of the living and the dead which constitutes the continuity of social life, society itself. The person-hood of women among the Tallensi is of a lesser order than that of men for women lack the domestic and lineage authority of men. For the Taita, Harris notes that the full range of ritual powers is not open to women so that they reach the limits of their achieved personhood sooner than men. In all three societies children are, by definition, not persons; Taita chil-dren are treated as extensions of their parents and referred to as 'some-

Person and individual in anthropology 131 body's child', a phrase which may also be used of adults when their ritual and social dependency is being stressed. (It may perhaps be noted that a phrase whicb recurs frequently in English discussions of the emancipa-tion of women is' 'a person in her own right' which suggests that sexual differentiation in personhood is not entirely alien to Western Europe!) Autonomy and responsibility thus seem vital to the concept of person-hood and certain individuals by virtue of their sex, or their specialist roles, are excluded. They are individuals and may wield considerable power; they afe not persons. It is the Tallensi ethnography which indicates most clearly that the concept of person there refers to what Harris calls a 'moral career' (1978:48), using this term to refer to an essentially similar situation among the Taita. Among the Tallensi an individual is first identified by birth into a particular lineage, his public name associates him with an event in his family's history and his private name, together with the ancestors in his Personal Destiny shrine, distinguish him among his agnates, though not to society at large. It is the completion of a proper life which qualifies an individual for full personhood, for marriage and the birth of children are essential prerequisites. Fortes emphasises that no individual qualities of behaviour or temperament can disqualify a parent from personhood; conversely, no matter how loved and admired an individual may be, if he or she fails to fulfil the ideal patrern of life and leaves no children, then full personhood has not been attained. Lugbara women can never become full persons for they lack orindi, the sense of responsibility, although some old women may have power in their own right; unlike the Lugbara, the Taita do accord full person-hood to women but this quality is developed over the course of an indi-vidual's life. To be more precise the ritual recognition of the accumula-tion of roles and statuses marks the progress of Taita men and women towards full personhood. The process starts at initiation when the boy or girl ceases to be "somebody's child" and becomes an adult, a transi-tion fully accomplished at marriage. Married adults become, in a sense, the equals of their parents; Taita express this by saying that a man be-comes a brother to his father. As householders they are equal. However a man whose father is alive, like a Tallensi or Lugbara man in the same situation, is still not fully independent and capable of autonomous ac-tion. A husband and wife may still be referred to as 'somebody's children' in ritual where this dependency is vital. Harris sees ritual in Taita life as helping "to create personhood by ritually conferring its elements upon the individual and transforming happenings in the life-cycle into moral 132

J.S. La Fontaine events" (1978:76). It is the long-drawn-out character of this transfor-mation of the individual into ,a person which characterises non-Western societies. In Western societies the conferring of a name serves to achieve the same end; personhood and individuality are thus identified from the beginning. ' By contrast, for the Tallensi, personhood is finally validated at the death of the individual. Fortes lays great stress on this element in T allensi thought. At death, the Tallensi divine to discover the cause of death to reassure themselves that the death was such as to confer personhood on the de-ceased, that he was not, for example,_ a bush sprite masquerading as a human being. A ':good death" for the Tallensi is one which derives from the ancestors and which follows the assumption of the full range of sta-tuses proper for the individual, in particular that of parent. The essence of Tallensi personhood is thus continuity, as it is for the Lugbara, for even Lugbara men cannot become significant ancestors (ghosts in Mid-dleton's terminology) unless they have sons, although the orindi of any man survives after death as part of the nameless dead, the ancestors as a collectivity. According to Fortes, personhood is conferred by society on the individual. There are two aspects of the matter to be borne in mind, he argues: the awareness of its bearer of socially generated personhood, that is, the assemblage of roles and statuses and, secondly, the qualities and powers associated with personhood that are conferred on individu-als. Here personhood is explicitly associated with office in the Weberian sense; Fortes tells us, what is also clear from the other accounts, that "an individual is invested with the capacities of personhood specific to de-fined roles and statuses" (1973:287, my italics). The completed person, whether Tallensi, Lugbara or Taita is the product of a whole life. By conferring personhood on the individual such societies also, though im-plicitly, distinguish between person and individual, conferring moral worth not on the individual but on the social form, which includes as a vital element the maintenance of continuity. The concept serves to fuse the finite span of a human life with the unlimited continuity of social forms, by identifying personhood witb self-reproduction. How far can we say that Mauss's conclusion has been validated by subsequent ethnographic investigation? Pace Fortes, I would say that it has been. The use of Radcliffe-Brown's concept of the social personality enabled Fortes to classify Tallensi ideas, and allowed me to classify Taita and Lugbara ideas, too, as concepts of the person. However, the concept of the person as manifest in individualism, the 'personne morale' makes it clear that it does not refer to the sum of statuses; Mauss uses the term T I Person and indivi!l in anthropology 133 personnage for such a concept. The person in individualism implies a general moral status accorded individual human beings by virtue of their humanity, which recognises their autonomy and responsibility for their actions.6 It is, as Mauss argued, the extension into the moral sphere of the concept of the unique nature of the individual. By contrast, the ideas I have been discussing here particularise, they do not generalise. In spite of general terms such as the Tallensi niriba, which serves to distinguish people both from animals and disembodied spirits, personhood varies according to social criteria which contain tlie capacities of the individual within defined roles and categories. Indeed, one might say that where personhood is a status reserved for defined categories of people, parents or men, by implication those who are not persons are individuals and such concepts may be said to distinguish more clearly between these two ideas than most Western versions. There is evidence from the three Afri-can societies to support this contention. Fortes reports that when an elder is invested with linear office he is left alone for one night with the insignia of office; if he is unworthy of the responsibility the office may kill him (Fortes, 1973). In similar vein, Lngbara elders inflict with illness those who defy their authority; however it is tressed by Middleton that an elder should not use his powers to punish offences committed against him as an individual but only those which attack his office (Middleton, 1973). His powers are thought to derive from the ancestors who are concerned, not with individuals, but with the maintenance of social order. The Taita doctrine of the anger of hearts is similar in its effects, although the pow-ers of anger are not restricted to lineage elders among the Taita; even a child may cause harm by its anger. Taita believe that proneness to anger is a natural human characteristic, although they recognise that some in-dividuals are more quickly roused than others. In particular it is thought that anger is provoked when an individual sees the rights pertaining to his socially defined status being ignored or denied. Thus the anger of individuals defends the rights by which a person will be defined; 'casting out anger', the ritual to repair the harm caused by anger, thus emphasises the rights pertaining to roles and statuses, confirming the individual in-cumbency of them. It is important to note, though, the direction of attack by such mystical harm: anger causes harm to the person defined as re-sponsible in the relationship in which it occurs. Anger among Taita is thus a sanction against the improper nse of authority. Beattie has noted that the "abstract and immaterial components of the person ... " have in com.mon that they are conceived as "forces, powers or potentialities of some kind" (Beattie 1980:315). The Lugbara concept 134

J.S. La Fonta;ne of tali confirms this view; it also serves to underline the distinction be-tween individual and office, for tal; refers to the ability of an individual to influence others as an individual, and not an office-holder. All Lugbara are believed to have tali, which grows with age, being weak in children and strongest in powerful elders. Old women, particularly the elder sis-ters of lineage elders, have strong tali, even though they are not persons and cannot exercise authority like their brothers. TaU is also responsible for the powers of other categories of non-person: rainmakers and divi-ners. TaU is clearly a quality of individuals; it is a direct manifestation of Spirit, although it is connected with lineage organisation for the lineage has a pool of taU to which the taU of members is added when they die. Agnates can t h e ~ e f o r e augment the lineage pool or store of tal; if their own is strong. It is significant that Tallensi by contrast know of believers in powers conferred directly on individuals through possession or the direct intervention of spirits, and do not credit them (Fortes 1979:68). In the Tallensi system of collective representations there is no room for in-dividual powers, for powers are exercised by individuals only as the au-thority of office. The distinction between individual and person, and the nature of the constituent elements of the person seem connected with the degree to which office and office-holder are distinguished, the degree to which such offices are in fact institutionalised. All Tallensi, Lugbara and Taita are individuals but not all are recognised as full persons; those that are ex-ercise powers and must accept responsibilities, which are attributed to the office; office is legitimised in a variety of ways, which we can call traditional, in Weberian terms. By contrast, the Gahuku-Gama appear to make no distinction between actor and role, individual and person; the bodies of living beings are, at the same time, both private selves and social persons. There seem to be no offices in this society and the only authority is that of senior kinsmen. The link between the nature of authority and the concept of the person is suggested by Beteille in an article on inequality (1980:5). He attacks the association of equality with individualism which is made by Dumont .(and see the quote from MacFarlane earlier in this chapter). He goes on to point out that individualism is most developed in those societies where achievement is considered of great importance and competition is the means by which individuals acquire power and office. By contrast, in hierarchical societies, ascription assigns the social and political roles of individuals and inequalities inhere in social roles. Hence, by a paradox, Western societies conceive of natural man, the individual, as equal in Person and ;nAual in anthropology 135 order to disguise the inequalities of achievement; Indian society, the locus of Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus, is free to acknowledge equality emerg-ing from individual behaviour, since inequality is ascribed. Dumont and Beteille are using a much broader canvas than I attempt to cover; how-ever, if we apply their approach to the four societies I have used as ex-amples in this paper, there are interesting results. While all four societies are similar in some respects, as I indicated ear. lier, the axis along which they conspicuously vary is that of the nature of authority. Among the Tallensi strict succession by agnatic seniority is the principle by which the authority of office is allocated; the political unit is defined by a genealogy which also establishes a hierarchy among ag-nates.7 Power inheres in the traditional office; there is a clear indication that this is so in the Tallensi belief, cited earlier, that if an unworthy individual allows himself to be invested with office, it will kill him. Per-sonhood, like office, is a fulfilment of social roles and, significantly, is finally validated only when the individual ceases to exist, at death. Among the Taita a measure of achievement allows some men to surpass their fellows; there are no offices conferring authority on their incumbents. Instead a hierarchy of shrines, medicines of increasing power, is assoei-ated in its lower ranks with the life-cycle as bench-marks on the route to full personhood. The successful progress further and faster along this route than the insignificant; the more powerful the shrines, the fewer the elders entitled to own them. The summit of attainment is a ritual few achieve, which in some sense confers ancesterhood on a man before his death. In a manner totally alieu to the Tallensi, a married Taita man achieves a measure of equality with his father; thereafter his personhood increases with his success, though at each stage it must be ritually vali-dated, by his seniors. Authority increases throughout a successful moral career. The Lugbara represent another variation: as among the Tallensi, the politically significant unit is constituted genealogically and seniority is a matter of agnatic succession; however, the concept of powers derived from Spirit introduces a new element: charismatic authority. Rainmakers and diviners are non-persons, outside the normal structure of traditional authority. They are individuals possessing tali, the power to influence others and their specialist powers are received direct from Spirit as indi-viduals. One could argue, against Middleton, that such people are not non-persons, they are persons in the Westeru sense, except for the fact that they are exceptional, abnormal. Moreover their powers are not en-tirely outside the lineage framework.8 It seems clear that as far as these three examples are concerned, that 136 ].S. La Fontaine the greater the emphasis on traditional office, the dearer is the distinction between individual and person, and, that where individual achievement of influence is recognised, as among the Lugbara and to some .extent the Taita, then more than one concept of the person may co-exist. Recogni-tion of individuality exists in all three African societies, but among the Tallensi and among the T aita full personhood is the attainment of a whole life, a moral career, which is not achieved by all; the influence of the actor on his role receives recognition in the Taita doctrine of the anger of hearts, and they do not attribute authority to dearly-defined office but to a lad-der of achieved rirual powers. Each new rung of the ladder must receive public recognition cby ritual investirure. The Lugbara appear to have a double concept of power, tali and the ancestral power of invGGatitm-exo __ ercised by elders, and it is consistent with this that there are possibilities of exercising social influence outside the hierarchy defined by genealogy. None of the three African societies can be said to have systems of com-petitive leadership; there are kinship and descent principles which rank individuals. By contrast the Gahuku-Gama present the very picrure of free competition. There we find the pattern of aggressive achievement, of shifting alliances and Big Men striving to hold together followings which are vulnerable to the vagaries of war or the success of others (the pattern made familiar by the ethnographers of Highland New Guinea). Where the Taita dislike violence and seek to prevent and control it, among these Highlanders it is "the warp C!f the cultural pattern and is manifest alike in many day to day situations as well as many institutional contexts" (Read 1955:254). Read states: "The majority of social rewards go to the physically strong and self-assertive; to the proud and the flamboyant and to the extroverted warrior and orator who demands, and usually obtains, the submission of his fellows. As a result we find that people are mark-edly aware of themselves as individuals" (Read 1955:254). Read admin-istered special tests, devised by N adel, to check his findings and these confirmed the personality characteristics his impressions suggested. Yet he argues that the Gahuku-Gama view of man does not distinguish be-tween the individual and his social roles. If, as Beteille has argued (1980); individualism reflects a competitive society, one would expect the Ga-huku-Gama to hold a concept of the person more akin to that of the West. The fact that they do not suggests that something is missing in the initial formulation, a crucial element which accounts for the unique char-acter of the individualist concept of the person. What has been overlooked in discussions of the Western notions is that they exist in the context of a particular concept of society as a whole: the 1. ... . I Person and indi,!al in anthropology 137 idea of the nation-state. The idea of the whole is integral to MacFarlane's definition of individualism with which I began: "society is constituted of autonomous equal units" and, equally, the individual is a constituent unit of society. The institutions which reflect the idea of the (individual-ist) person are established and maintained by a society organised on the rule of law, the state in which persons are citizens. In such a society all members, even rulers are, ideally, subject to the law. As Weber pointed out long ago, this principle is the defining characteristic of bureaucratic organisation. The main features of such structures are: a clear qistinction between office and office-holder, and hence between an individual and his social role, and the allocation of authority on the basis of fitness for office, fitness being of course a quality of individuals. The equality of persons and competition for office are thus integral to the strucrure of Western society. Hierarchy and inequality are conceptualised as attri-butes of social roles; all individuals are equal as persons. By contrast, all the other societies I have been discussing base their concept of society on the idea of tradition, established once and for all. Society is the projection over time of the original founders, heroes or ancestors. From the outsider's point of view, this means that the bound-aries of society are established by the genealogy which relates living peo-ple to these original beings. The genealogy creates a structure in which the relations of individuals to the whole are mediated through a series of more and more inclusive links. The farther removed in time the ancestor , the wider the group that recognises its identity by reference to that focal point. The widest referent may not be the same as that which might be defined by a common language. The significant feature is that, ideally, in such a society each new baby has a position defined at birth, which re-lates it to this strucrure and the succession of generations. Only full sib-lings have the same social identity and even they may be ranked in order of birth, as they are distinguished by sex. Personhood in such a society is, as Raddiffe-Brown pointed out, a complex of social relationships. As more social relations are added through life, personhood approaches completion, but the critical feature is the social relation with the next generation whereby society is continued into yet another generation. Not every individual is fully a person, or even a person at all, in societies which define human beings by their place in a social chain linking past with present. The Gahuku-Gama seem to lack all concepts of a social whole. Little of myth or legend exists among them to establish a traditional identity and genealogies are shallow, serving to organise small groups which are

138 J.S. La Fontaine vulnerable to warfare and other demographic accidents. They live in a social world of change and instability. There are no fixed units of alle-giance nor offices which confer authority, wider than that of senior kins-man. Warfare is endemic; residential and social groupings change with the shifting alliances that are organised by competing leaders. In accord-ance with this weakly developed notion of the social whole and its con-tinuity, the Gahuku-Gama concept of the human being emphasises the transient physical form. Even cultural differences, such as those of ritual practice or language, are seen in terms of individual characteristics, as different kinds of 'skin'. 'Skin', the outer covering of the self, is the means by which the social is represented. Human beings may embody various social roles but they cannot be distinguished from them; society as such barely exists beyond the interactions of living individuals. Thus the com-petitive basis for leadership among Gahuku-Gama is different from that in Western society, for the distinction made in the latter between the office and the qualities of the individual incumbent that legitimise his or her tenure, requires competitors to be conceptualised apart from their other social roles, as persons. Among the Gahuku-Gama, by contrast, competition takes place between social selves, seeking power and domi-nance, not selection for office. In his concluding paragraph, Mauss warns us that the idea of the per-son characteristic of our society is neither universal nor immutable. HIt is formulated only for us, among us". In comparing the concepts of the person in four non-Western societies with our own, I have tried to suggest how we may understand their variant forms. The key to such under-standing is, I suggest, the recognition that concepts of the person are embedded in a social context. In particular they relate to the degree of institutionalisation of offices and the nature of authority. The existence of an office logically entails a distinction between the powers and respon-sibilities pertaining to it and their exercise by different incumbents. Hence some concept of the individual as distinct from the office is established. However, the way in which an individual is accorded the moral status of personhood depends on other social features. As Fortes points out, the concept of the person relates mortal, transient human beings to a contin-uing social whole. Ideas of society, variously conceptualised, and the na-ture of the concept of the person are thus interdependent. In modern states with their bureaucratic hierarchies, society is conceived of as an organisation of competing individuals, citizens of the state. Continuity lies in a structure of offices and roles to which individuals accede accord-ing to their personal qualities. In such societies person and individual are

Person and individual in anthropology 139 virtually indistinguishable. By contrast, where society is seen as the de-scendants of founding ancestors, personhood is the fulfillment of a so- cially significant career, of which the crucial elements are parenthood and paternal authority. In these societies, not all individuals are persons. Societies based on a principle of patrilineal descent are not identical, as the examples discussed here have shown. Their concepts of the person vary according to the particular principles by which authority is legitim-ised. Among the Lugbara or Taita the lejlitimate exercise of power by particular individuals is recognised; among the Tallensi it is not. Their concepts of the person vary accordingly. The final example, that of the Gahuku-Gama, shows how a weakly elaborated sense of social continu-ity and the absence of institutionalised offices require no concept of the person. Social characteristics of individuals are represented by images of the living body, not by concepts of the person. The Western concept resembles none of those described so far in other societies. Its unique character is not simply the result of greater sophistication or elaboration of conceptual thought but, as Mauss has made us aware, it derives from a particular social context. Notes 1. Earlier versions of this paper were read at the Departments of Anthropology in Dur-ham and Oxford and at a seminar in Wolfson College. I am grateful to colleagues at both those places and at the London Sc:hool of Economics for comments which have helped me clarify the argument. They cannot be held responsible for this final form. 2. See Beattie (1980) for a similar point. 3. Notably by Dumont (1970) in which he criticises a certain school of sociology for sociocentrism in making this individual the centre of sociological analysis. He includes in his strictures (rightly to my mind) certain strands in recent anthropological thought. Of course Radcliffe-Brown cannot really be included as a methodological individualist but the paper mentioned has in common with that view a concern with motivation. As John Beattie has reminded me, Radcliffe-Brown's later answer to the problem of the Mother's Brother is in terms of social structure. 4. As the English phrase "a real person" indicates. 5. Since Mauss restricts the term 'person' (personne morale) to one variety of such con-cepts, Fortes's use of the term is not strictly Maussian. 6. However, even individualism allows for greater or lesser personality. I am grateful to Rosine Perelberg for reminding me of this; however, the negative connotation of the phrase 'cult of personality' seems to indicate that there should be limits to the recog-nition of individual differences in this way. 7. I am here, as throughout this paper, concerned with the social representations of these units, not the composition of actual political groups. 8. Unlike those of Lugbara prophets who have appeared in exceptional crises in Lugbara history. They represent a more developed form of charismatic authority, which I can-not deal with here. 140 ].S. La Fontaine Bibliography . d' I AI B . J 1980 Review article: "Representations of the Self In Tra ltlona -eattle,. . rica". Africa 50(3). . Beteille, A. 1977. Inequality among Men. Basil Blackwell, Oxford .. 1980. "The Idea of Natural Inequality". Auguste Trust Th L ndon School of Economics and Political SClence, Londor,l. ture, eo. . . 9 0) W'd t Id d Dumont, L. 1966. Homo Hierarchicus, EnglIsh edmon (1 7 . el en e an Nicholson, London. ..' d d' 1970. "The Individual as Impediment to Comparison an tan H" ,,' Re/,'g,'on Politics and History in Indta: Collected Papers tn In-lstOry ,In; , dian Society. MoutOll, The Hague.. ." . F M 1973 the Concept of the Person among the Tallensl , III La ortes,. " . lEd' . d C t e Notion de la Personne en Afrique Noire, ed. G. Dieter en. mons u en r National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. 1979. "Coping with Destiny, Among the Tallensi", in Fantasy and Symbol, ed. R. H. Hook. Academic Press. London . m H . G 1978 Casting out Anger: Religion among the Talta of Kenya. Ca -arns,. . bridge University Press. .... 11M F I A 1978 The Origins of English Indlvldua/zsm. Bas" Blackwe , ac ar ane,. . Oxford. h L b ". L N M'ddl J 1973 "The Notion of the Person among t e ug ara ,Ill a 0-I eton,. . Ed" dC d tion de Personne en Afrique Noire, ed. G. Dieterlen. ItlOns u entre e la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. . . R cl I'ff BAR 1940 "On Social Structure" in Structure and Functton tn a Cl e- rown, .. . Primitive society. Cohen and West, London. Read, K. 1955. "Morality and the Concept of the Person among the Gahuku-Gama". Oceania 25(4). .

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7 Self: public, private. Some African representations Godfrey Lienhardt At the very beginning of Levy-Bruhl's book L'Ame Primitive (1927) (translated as The 'Soul' of the Primitive, and those quotation marks around Soul mark it as an area of the translator's uncertainty), the author took it for granted that his 'primitives' would be confnsed if asked about those aspects of themselves which now concern us: It is scarcely likely that primitives have ever given a form, however indefi-nite, to the more or less implicit ideas they have of their own personality. At any rate it would he quite useless to question them about it, for ambi-guity and misunderstanding would be the only result. He suggests that his readers, by contrast, would have more clearly for-mulated answers ready. Yet in the year in which L'Ame Primitive was published, Aldous Huxley, refl.ecting on Proust's phrase 'the intermit-tence of the heart', observed that: The number of completely u'nified personalities is small. Most of us go through life incompletely unified - part person, the rest a mere collection of discontinuous psychological elements. And Ouspensky, of course, had gone much fnrther. In a lecture given in 1922 he is reported on as follows: Man misunderstood himself:. he thought he had a permanent self, a master which integrated and controlled his thoughts and actions. But this was an illusion. Instead of the single 'I' there were innumerable I's, many of which said contradictory things. Then Ouspensky got up and drew a circle on the blackboard, and divided it by criss-cross lines until it looked like a fly's eye seen under a microscope. In each little space he put an and said 'this is a picture of Man'.